Savannah's Midnight Hour: Boosterism, Growth, and Commerce in a Nineteenth-Century American City

Savannah’s Midnight Hour argues that Savannah’s development is best understood within the larger history of municipal finance, public policy, and judicial readjustment in an urbanizing nation. In providing such context, Lisa Denmark adds constructive complexity to the conventional Old South/New South dichotomous narrative, in which the politics of slavery, secession, Civil War, and Reconstruction dominate the analysis of economic development. Denmark shows us that Savannah’s fiscal experien...